The Pirate’s Dilemma tells the story of how youth culture drives innovation and is changing the way the world works. It offers understanding and insight for a time when piracy is just another business model, the remix is our most powerful marketing tool and anyone with a computer is capable of reaching more people than a multi-national corporation.
I'm persuaded by this argument, mostly because I'm easily persuaded by flashy videos that paint the big companies as villains and pirate anti-heroes as hip, awesome people with tech savvy--I think I've seen that movie.
But there is more there, the companies aren't villains, they're just stupid. There's nothing bad, they just don't know what to do. Companies appear to be not helping themselves, either, especially when you have buffoonery such as Ford saying it owns pictures you took of their cars. (Resolved: CafePress' error).
As the slideshow points out (I haven't read the book), sometimes lawsuits are the way to go. But there are a lot of pirates in the world. Can they sue everyone?
What happens when the third world starts computing? When they start using this technology through the lens of their culture?
There are companies that offer stop-gap fixes to the piracy problem (see: MediaDefender, and then Hacking into MediaDefender via Digg), but they are not winning.
Industries that insist on suing and harming their customers will fall, as others have before, now they just make a louder noise.
How does this relate, then, back to authorship? Do I own my remixes & mashups? Even the use of the word "my" there is kind of suspect.
I assembled this Christmas card last year.
I used photos from all over the Internet. The one of Vlad there is an old painting. The tree is from some fake Christmas tree dealer (don't even remember). The guy? I think that's something I cropped out of a video game. I'm not even sure any more. The font is something default in Windows, I think.So, who made that thing? Is it piracy?
3 comments:
Wow, reading that a few days later makes even less sense.
Slashdot has an interesting story about fair use, as well.
Quoth the article: "General counsel for NBC Rick Cotton and Tim Wu, professor at Columbia Law school, continue their debate about copyright issues and technology on Saul Hansell's blog at the New York Times discussing Fair Use of commercial music and video as the raw materials for new creations. Cotton says that content protection on the broadband internet is really not a debate about fair use The fact that users can 'take three or four movies and splice together their favorite action scenes and post them online does not mean that these uses are fair. There needs to be something more — something that truly injects some degree of original contribution from the maker other than just the assembly of unchanged copies of different copyrighted works.' Wu's position is that 'it is time to recognize a simpler principle for fair use: work that adds to the value of the original, as opposed to substituting for the original, is fair use. This simple concept would bring much clarity to the problems of secondary authorship on the web.' This is a continuation of the previous discussion on copy protection."
You raise a lot of interesting questions, but I think you ought to address the more immediate question on everybody's mind:
How can I get on your XMas card list?
LOL, seriously.
Awesome.
That was a very short run, I think 3 people got that one.
Though I've been thinking of expanding it. One person carries it around with him and shows his friends.
I don't know if I can compete with Hallmark, though.
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